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Steve Purcell
Steve Purcell is the legal owner of the Sam & Max copyrights and the sole writer/illustrator for the Sam & Max comics. Career Early career At the where Purcell attended and graduated, Sam & Max appeared in print for the first time in 1980. In 1987, the first full-fledged Sam & Max 32-page comic appeared. In between illustration assignments and animation work for LucasArts, three other Sam & Max books were produced. During this time he also did freelance work for , as well as writing the comic book series, . LucasArts work Steve contributed to the background work and animation for several in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The most popular of the games he worked on were the first two Monkey Island games. Steve also provided the box artwork for these two games, as well as the covers to Zak McKracken and Pipe Dream. He illustrated the Grail diary of Henry Jones, which accompanied the game. Purcell also painted several Sam & Max comic strips for the LucasArts company newsletter, The Adventurer. During this period, many of the games made at LucasArts featured cameos or glimpses of Sam and Max. For instance, both characters show up in the 1990 released The Secret of Monkey Island as idols to the Monkey Island cannibals, located in front of the giant monkey head.http://dotplan.codesurgeonblog.com/post/26516100 features Max depicted on a black and white portrait, dressed up in a suit, wearing a bow tie on the second floor of the Edison mansion.http://dotplan.codesurgeonblog.com/post/27683914 In 1993 Purcell created an based on the characters and comic book, called Sam & Max Hit the Road. It was developed by LucasArts, and saw Sam and Max traveling America in search of two missing carnival freakshow attractions—Bruno the Bigfoot and Trixie the Giraffe-necked Girl. Purcell co-designed the game with , and . After leaving LucasArts, Purcell worked for a time at working on an eventually-canceled animated film. Post LucasArts In 1997, Sam and Max had their own -produced animated TV series, which ran for one season. Some changes were made to the world of the comics and the game, principally the addition of a pre-teen girl genius character "The Geek", but much of the humor remained intact. The cartoon focused less on guns & violence, and more on weirdness. Purcell later joined to work in their Story Development division, where he works to this day. He is amongst other things credited under additional screenplay material for the animated movie Cars. LucasArts's sequel to Sam & Max Hit the Road, Sam & Max: Freelance Police, was suddenly canceled very late in its production in March 2004. Sometime following this cancellation, the game rights reverted back to Purcell's ownership. In September 2005, it was announced that Telltale Games, a small company started by ex-LucasArts employees who had been working on Freelance Police, was working on creating a new episodic Sam & Max game series with the help of Purcell. The first game of the series, Sam & Max Culture Shock was released on October 17 2006 by , the second game, Sam & Max Situation: Comedy was released on December 21 2006 by GameTap. After finishing the 6th episode in April 2007, Season One was finished. Due to the success of Season One, Season Two was started on GameTap and the Telltale Website in December 2007. Around the time Season One was announced Steve started work on The Big Sleep, a webcomic hosted by Telltale which ran from 2005 through 2007. He currently maintains a blog called Spudvision, on which he posts various art, using the alias Starchie Spudnoggen. See Also :Sam & Max (franchise) :LucasArts :The Adventurer comics :Sam & Max sightings in LucasArts games :Telltale Games :The Big Sleep External links Spudvision, Steve Purcell's blog. References Category:Real World People